'School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress. ...researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. "For years studies have underscored the importance of an early, nurturing environment for good, healthy outcomes for children," Luby says. "But most of those studies have looked at psychosocial factors or school performance. This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing. Having a hippocampus that's almost 10 percent larger just provides concrete evidence of nurturing's powerful effect."'

'Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn't mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid. Instead, the amygdala seems to be doing something more subtle: processing events that are related to what a person cares about at the moment. So if you're in a scary situation or have an anxious personality, the amygdala might be activated by a frightening image. But hungry people have increased amygdala activity in response to pictures of food and people who are very empathetic have an amygdala response to seeing other people. "When we're studying emotion, people want to find specific brain parts that are associated with different emotions," Cunningham says. Especially in the early days of neuroscience, scientists hoped that soon it would be possible to use MRI and other brain-imaging techniques "to get under the hood and find out what people are really thinking." A lot of the time, people really don't know, or won't say, what they're thinking, and it would be nice to be able to look at a picture of their brain and know the answer. But the brain is too complicated for that. "Emotion is going to be distributed across the brain," Cunningham says.'

"When you're a baby, your parents are substitutes for your pre-frontal cortex..." -- "How does the other shape the self? Well, we internalize their perspective." -- 'We treat our self like we have a self. We learn what we are like. We learn what we ought to be like. Self-knowledge is not gained from introspection.'

'For over ten years Gabor Mate has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV, and in many cases all four. But if Dr. Mate's patients are at the end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, compulsive work habits, sexual seeking or spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our spirits?'

How violence happens, using the hand model of the brain: http://youtu.be/DD-lfP1FBFk

"Differentiated parts become linked together." - "Health is defined by integration."

"The brain is the social organ of the body." - "The mind is in your body and in your relationships." - "Our minds are created by our relationships." - "The body is the physical mechanism by which energy and information flows. Relationships are the sharing of energy and information flows. And the mind is the emergent, self-organizing process arising from both our bodies and our relationships." - "Thoughts have a quality of absolute certainty. When you give people the power to do what the mind really does, which is shift degrees of probability of energy flow, and bring them down to this open space which we call awareness, you actually strengthen the capacity of the mind to not only see things clearly, but literally to integrate experience... this is the way you stay fully present to another person and also to yourself."

'This interactive talk will examine two major questions: What is the mind? and How can we create a healthy mind? We'll examine the interactions among the mind, the brain, and human relationships and explore ways to create a healthy mind, an integrated brain, and mindful, empathic relationships. In this talk, well offer a working definition of the mind and practical implications for how to perceive and strengthen the mind itself—a learnable skill called mindsight.'

'...the attention that we receive as babies impacts on our brain structures. Babies rely on their carers to soothe distress and restore equilibrium. -- ...children who lived with a depressed parent in infancy are more reactive to stress later in life; children who lived with a depressed parent later in childhood showed no such effect. This makes sense if we remember that the stress response is probably being "set" like a thermostat very early in life. It also makes sense in evolutionary terms to have newborn brains which are unfinished, because they can be adapted to fit the needs of the social group. In effect, they can be programmed to behave in ways that suit their community. However, it is a risky strategy. In a harsh environment, a baby's cries may be ignored, or he may be punished for being distressed. This is likely to produce an individual who becomes, in his turn, relatively insensitive and prone to aggression – and this could be useful in a tense, hostile community.'

'The attempt to escape from feelings has its origins in a babyhood in which the baby's feelings have not been identified and responded to in a contingent way. You can only change emotional processing by doing it differently. When a particular feeling is aroused, neurotransmitters are released from the subcortex and old neural networks automatically become activated to manage this state of arousal in the old way. If your therapist accepts your feelings, they do not have to be denied by the neural network which would normally do that, or acted upon by the neural network that would normally respond in that way. The therapist's acceptance allows a mental space to reflect on the feelings and consider how to respond afresh. Whilst the feelings are alive and active, so too are the stress hormones which will assist new (higher brain) cortisol synapses to be made in response to the sub-cortical signals. Together with the therapist, new networks can be developed.'

'...the human brain at birth is not fully developed. The abilities a person's brain develops depend on experiences in the first three years of life. Studies on abandoned and severely mistreated Romanian children revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain and marked emotional and cognitive insufficiencies in later life. According to very recent neurobiological findings, repeated traumatization leads to an increased release of stress hormones that attack the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroy existing neurons. Other studies of mistreated children have revealed that the areas of the brain responsible for the "management" of emotions are 20 to 30 percent smaller than in normal persons. In the absence of positive factors, affection and helping witnesses, the only course open to the mistreated individual is the disavowal of personal suffering and the idealization of cruelty with all its devastating after-effects.'

'A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that "minds are what brains do". The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results. This idea is perhaps best summarized by the following quote: What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. – Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, p. 308'

'Early-childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse and witnessing domestic violence undermine the normal wiring of brain circuits, especially those circuits connecting the left and right sides of the brain through a massive bundle of connections called the corpus callosum. Impairment in integrating information between right and left hemispheres is associated with increased risk of craving, drug abuse and dependence, and a weakened ability to make moral judgments. In a study published in 2006, the researchers showed that parental verbal abuse was more strongly associated with these detrimental effects on brain development than was parental physical abuse. In a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (July), they report that exposure to verbal abuse from peers is associated with elevated psychiatric symptoms and corpus callosum abnormalities. The most sensitive period for verbal abuse from peers in impairing brain development was exposure during the middle school years.'

'Why people become violent.' -- "We are not born violent; we are not born war-like; we are not born aggressive; the mind and the emotional content of the brain are *created*."

'Synaptic pharmacology is the study of drugs that act on the synapses. It deals with the composition, uses, and effects of drugs that may enhance (receptor) or diminish (blocker) activity at the synapse, which is the junction across which a nerve impulse passes from an axon terminal to a neuron, muscle cell, or gland cell.'

Addiction as pain relief. "The truth about most hardcore substance abusers is that they were all abused as children. Brain biology is determined by very early environment, not by hereditary." -- "Most people who try most drugs never become addicted. The substances themselves cannot impose the addiction. There has to be a susceptibility there. And that's rooted in the brain. The brain biology itself is not genetically inherited. It has to do what happened to that person in early life. The biology of the brain is programmed and largely determined by what happened during pregnancy and especially in the first 3 or 4 years of life. And that means that people with severe adversity and stress, pre-natally and post-natally, very often have impairments in their brain functioning in particularly important circuits. It's abuse and severe stress that impairs the brain in such a way as to make a person a sitting duck for addictions later on when they come into contact with a potentially addictive substance."

'After extinction, the fear memory is merely suppressed, not erased, and therefore these memories could resurface under certain conditions, such as unrelated stress. In some cases, the re-emergence of the emotional memory is maladaptive, leading to anxiety disorders. While researchers have traditionally seen long-term memory as fixed and resistant, it is now becoming clear that memory is, in fact, dynamic and flexible. As a result, the act of remembering makes the memory vulnerable until it is stored again-a process called reconsolidation. During this instability period, new information could be incorporated into the old memory.'

'The idea may be "unpalatable", but companies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible. If a brand had been experienced from birth, the students were quicker to recognise it as real than if it had been encountered from age five and up. ...words (and presumably brands too) encountered early in life shape the maturing brain in such a way that a life-long advantage is maintained for processing those early words. ...participants aged between 50 and 83 years were quicker to recognise early brands over newer, current brands, even if the early brands were long since defunct.'

'A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat or 'alert' response in your limbic system. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn't like uncertainty - it's like a type of pain, something to be avoided. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain. Like an addiction to anything, when the craving for certainty is met, there is a sensation of reward. The ability to predict, and then obtain data that meets those predictions, generates an overall toward response. It's part of the reason that mind games like solitaire, Sudoku and crosswords are enjoyable. They give you a little rush from creating more certainty in the world, in a safe way. ...the one thing that's certain is that people will pay lots of money to at least feel less uncertain. That's because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.'

'"What we have designed would allow them to control a computer with their thoughts. If they imagine their muscles moving, that could flick a light switch for example. It's an area that is being heavily researched in America but so far all the tests have involved wired sensors. This prototype uses wireless technology to remove the risk of infection and that's the real drive of our work. The eventual aim would be to see these systems fully working so they are available to help patients communicate. That's the future.'''

NOM-NOM-NOM... DOH! -- 'BRAIN regions key to cognition are smaller in older people who are obese compared with their leaner peers, making their brains look up to 16 years older than their true age. As brain shrinkage is linked to dementia, this adds weight to the suspicion that piling on the pounds may up a person's risk of the brain condition. ...exercise, which improves cardiovascular health and blood flow, protects the very brain regions that had shrunk in the current study. "The most strenuous kind of exercise can save about the same amount of brain tissue that is lost in the obese," he says. This indicates that it is blood flow that drives brain health, not the other way round. As these areas undergo the most remodelling throughout adult life, they may be more sensitive to any changes in oxygen supply and nutrient. ...brain atrophy in the frontal and temporal lobes, which also control eating behaviour and metabolism, could cause weight gain.' -- Oxygenated 'Fat pills' needed.

'... the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb. -- ...patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.' -- Neurosecurity, barrier mazes, ghost hacks, oh my!

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

"The iPlant is a type of brain implant advocated as a means of programming yourself. The idea is that an iPlant would be similar to today's deep brain stimulation implants. The iPlant would electronically regulate the release of monoamines in the brain. Monoamines effectively determine motivation, mood, learning and creativity."

"Neuroscientists think they've identified the part of the brain that causes Tourette's Syndrome, the condition that causes random tics including compulsive obscenity. How long before we can hack that part of the brain? How long before we can craft a drug to restore normal structure to people's prefrontal lobes? Or even cause a temporary abnormality in people, to reduce their self-control? Just imagine dosing people at a party, or using it as a weapon to cause confusion among our enemies."

'"Did you move?" a researcher asked a 76-year-old man after lightly zapping a point on his parietal cortex. "No. I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth," he responded. After a stronger pulse to the parietal cortex, a 42-year-old man exclaimed: "My hand, my hand moved." Sirigu's team saw no signs of movement.'

'In essence, attention is the faculty by which the mind selects and then zeroes in on the most "salient" aspect of any situation. The problem is that the brain is not a unified whole, but a collection of "systems" that often come into conflict with each other. When that happens, the more primitive, stimulus-driven, unconscious systems (the "reactive" and "behavioral" components of our brains) will usually override the consciously controlled "reflective" mind. There are excellent reasons for this. In the conditions under which humanity evolved, threats had the greatest salience; individuals who spotted and eluded dangers before they went chasing after rewards tended to live long enough to pass on their traits to future generations. As a result, we inherited from our distant ancestors the tendency to pay greater attention to the unpleasant and troublesome elements of our surroundings.. -- ..a constant diet of reactive-system stimuli has the potential to alter our very brains.' -- *gulps*

"All you have to do is concentrate. On anything, it doesn't matter. The harder you concentrate, the higher the ball goes. A musician says he played a song in his head and focused on a particular chord change. A former high school tennis star focused on his 120-mph serve. One woman brought the image of a candle flame to mind. The ball rose." -- There is no spoon! -- "What happens when millions of youngsters in a notoriously ADHD generation start getting programmed by these new toys? What happens when they start being rewarded for very long periods of intense concentration? Nobody in the toy industry seems to know. It's not unusual for new technologies to first enter popular consciousness as toys."

'.. the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation – they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are ...their reality arrives without a filter. -- "Adults can follow directions and focus, and that's great," says John Colombo, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. "But children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that's going on. And this makes sense: If you don't know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in."' -- On purposefully reducing activity in the brain's prefrontal cortex: 'Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."' -- Life in widescreen with fat pipes

In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking website Twitter—just by thinking about it.

'These findings suggest that our own self-control can be worn out simply by mentally simulating another person acting with self-control. The authors note, for example, that imagining someone else's self-control "could result in small breakdowns of self-control, such as employees speaking out improperly during a meeting, to catastrophic ones, such as police officers responding to an emotionally charged encounter with deadly force."'

"Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory is explicable in terms of three neurobiological mechanisms: the frontal cortex, which mediates concentration; the pleasure centre (the nucleus accumbens), which releases dopamine in response to both the achievement of goals and the anticipation of such achievement under uncertain conditions; and the fight-or-flight mechanism, specifically the arousal produced by epinephrine (which enhances rewards) and the anxiety that results when the amygdala is activated when an individual feels out of their depth. Between these three mechanisms, all the many and various optimal experiences result." -- See related chart: http://bit.ly/smp5K

Dr. Karl Deisseroth: "Thoughts, feelings and drives derive from patterns of electrical activity ... [but] there are other ways to think about it. The mind could be that little spark of consciousness that is floating around, guiding your direction and attention and desires and thoughts. Something that recruits different parts of the brain.... What is that little floating entity that uses the brain? The part that uses the visual cortex, that uses sensory input, what is that?" -- The dialler.

Dr. Karl Deisseroth: "Not only do we not have a model for how our brains do complex tasks, we can't even imagine one."

"Right now, with the cooperation of desperate people, scientists could be using CaMKII to erase their old lives. Then they'll just need to implant new personalities and emotions."

'We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.' -- '"Being put on pause" is how one of my students describes the feeling of walking down the street with a friend who has just taken a call on his cell. "I mean I can't go anywhere; I can't just pull out some work. I've just been stopped in midsentence and am expected to remember, to hold the thread of conversation until he wants to pick it up again."

'Neurosurgery professor Tipu Aziz, said: "There is evidence that this chip will work. A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn't like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed." He continued: "When the technology is improved, we can use deep brain stimulation in many new areas. It will be more subtle, with more control over the power so you may be able to turn the chip on and off when needed.'

"A research team has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle."

Comment: Linuxguru1968: "How about this: deep reading of traditional books puts your brain into Beta (meditative) mode while reading off of a computer keeps you in Alpha wave (alert) mode..." -- (Beta=alert, Alpha=receptive, Theta=meditative, Delta=sleep)

"Question is, do you get off Google or stay on all the time? I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time."

"... the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the *idea* of reading War and Peace."

"We think this dialogue with a goal is how we can make these systems evolve over time... We want these devices to grow with the user."

"we were staring in awe instead of making money! I guess we got some entertainment out of it, which has some value. Now, we could have made money to buy entertainment; instead we just watched screens and got entertainment directly and that’s not taxed!"

*Speculation*: '... the Treasury Department went to the top guys at Bear and said: "Either a deal gets done that saves Bear and calms the financial system by the end of this weekend, or we will find some reason to put you in jail."'

"Bear Stearns... They’re still alive. Right now, there’s an EKG, it is pinging, they’re technically still alive and JPMorgan is waiting for the healthcare proxy to sign and say they can start harvesting the organs. This is where Bear is right now."

"the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves"

"Adderall is a pharmaceutical psychostimulant comprised of mixed amphetamine salts. It is a Schedule II controlled substance, meaning that it has been deemed to have a high potential for abuse and addiction, but has accepted medical uses."

"Evolutionary psychology is focused on how evolution has shaped the mind and behavior. Though applicable to any organism with a nervous system, most research in evolutionary psychology focuses on humans."

Video: "Ray Kurzweil projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline the ways we'll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever blurring the lines between human and machine."

"... people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills."

'"Women and men showed activity in the reward circuitry, which overlaps with addiction circuitry," Hoeft explained. "Men activated those regions more than women, and the brain regions moved together more than women."'

"In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond."

EEG game/simulation controller

Dan Dennet: "the fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future…brains are, in essence, anticipation machines"

"47pc of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing video-game victories and last-minute defeats, while 32pc of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes."

'Jane Healy said computer games fuelled the development of basic "flight or fight" instincts rather than considered reasoning... parents would be wise to keep children away from computer games until at least 7 to allow their brains to develop normally.'

Huh? We're already wired into the physical internets. The brain will just gatekeep like it always does. Plug me in.

"The multi-self team: An optimal and evolutionarily superior final state would be one's selves coming together in a new entity, a multi-self team, a pool of many nuances of self and abilities, a borg being broader and more capable than any individual."

'Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn. -- “My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u [sic] learn something there are connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I’m in school.”' -- Praise them for effort.

Irwin Chen, Parsons: “If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere. Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

"This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few savants."

How to use a TiddlyWiki to organise your thinking. (If only I could organise tiddlers spatially like stickies.)

"The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?"

"I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?"

You go, Crow.

"BCI games might give marketers and government entities the inside track on a user's emotional and brain states, potentially turning your computer into a polygraph..."

"Brain-Computer Interface"

OMFG! Share search queries with your friends??? My fingers have just stopped working.

"the results of this enhanced 'cognitive capacity' might not necessarily lead to increased IQ scores. I do think, however, that they will lead to increased storage and processing abilities."

Presentation: "Prediction: When your mother dies in 2050 your didgital mom will be 50% her. When your best friend dies in 2050, your digital friend will be 80% him."

"a reporter did simple calculations in her head, and the train sprang forward - apparently indicating activity in the brain's frontal cortex... A key advantage to Hitachi's technology is that [infrared] sensors don't have to physically enter the brain. "

"As well as potentially helping those with memory problems it could also be used for tourism or as a personal digital diary. Combined with other sensors such as a heart rate monitor, it could have other medical applications."

"Their theory explains how nerves and anesthetics work as follows: Nerves are made of lipids that are liquid at body temperature. A yet-to-be-defined mechanism creates high-pressure, semisolid waves that move through the cells, delivering messages."

"As social networks define themselves as platforms the hum of a media operating system becomes louder. Consider the network a bag of nerves; an emotional net that individuals define their transmission and reception rules."

"Cognitive therapy and its variants traditionally identify ten cognitive distortions that maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. The process of learning to refute these distortions is called "cognitive restructuring".

"Instead of prescribing milligrams I'm prescribing milliamps,"... the treatment stimulates norepinephrine and serotonin centers, now treated with pharma at a tepid success rate, and increases blood flow and neuron activity."

"This sort of memory capability allows mobile users to download high quality films to their phones and then enjoy them - and at that size (small and big), could it mean the return to buying the physical format?"

"Other options to language that would allow the permissioned knowing of value systems, beliefs and history would contribute to enriched communications. Mechanisms for sharing clusters of thought rather than individual ideas would also be a start."

"Large intelligence: collected sensory experience of individuals. Emotional experience, to the degree occurring in the digital medium, could be enhanced with merged intelligence both by amplifying sensory input and providing a multiplicity of experience."